By Jo Glover The Governance Golden Thread Ask someone on your team what they're working on this week. You'll get a good answer. Busy. Detailed. Real. Now try to trace it back to what your service is actually trying to achieve this year. If you can't quite draw the line, that's not a performance problem. It's a governance one. We tend to think of governance as a meeting. A committee. A terms of reference and a set of minutes nobody reads. So when the week gets hard, governance is the first...
8 days ago • 4 min read
By Jo Glover What operations actually is When something goes wrong in your portfolio, as the operations manager, you're the one who has to speak to it. When it goes well, the good work belongs to both you and your team. That's the job. Most position descriptions never quite name it. Ask people to define operations and you usually get a list. Workforce. Finance. Quality and safety. Access and flow. All true. All part of it. But a list misses the thing that actually makes it work. Operations is...
22 days ago • 2 min read
By Jo Glover When Capable Leaders Stop Deciding You’ve been in this situation. Maybe you’re in it now. A leader on your team, capable, experienced, values-driven, has started checking in more than usual. Decisions that used to happen at their level are landing on your desk. Staffing adjustments. Patient flow calls. Minor service recovery actions. Things they’ve handled a hundred times before. When you ask what’s changed, you get some version of the same answer. “Just checking with you, I...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
By Jo Glover The conversation you keep putting off If you lead a team in health, you already know the one. The staff member whose behaviour has been sliding for months. The clinician everyone quietly works around. The pattern that has become “just how they are.” You have probably had the conversation in your head a hundred times. You just haven’t had it out loud. That gap is where culture erodes. In the GRIP Framework, People sits across everything. Your governance, your resources and your...
3 months ago • 3 min read
By Jo Glover I Started as a Chemist. Here's What My Thinking Profile Revealed About 25 Years of Leading in Health. This is the first in a short series I'm exploring over the coming weeks — blending what I've learned across two decades of health operations leadership with some new thinking. It's about how we think, how that shapes the way we lead, and what becomes possible when we understand ourselves a little better. I hope it's useful. I didn't plan to work in health operations. I planned to...
4 months ago • 4 min read
By Jo Glover The Framework Holding Your Service Together (even when it doesn't feel like it) Most operational leaders I speak to right now aren't struggling because they lack commitment. They're struggling because they can't see the whole picture at once and feel like they are firefighting all the time. There's a governance issue over here. A workforce gap over there. Data they don't have time to read. A team that needs more from them than they have left to give. And somewhere underneath all...
4 months ago • 3 min read
By Jo Glover Late in 2025, I completed Brené Brown's Dare to Lead workshop alongside leaders from different organisations and industries. By mid-morning on day one, I noticed something I recognised immediately. On paper we were all very different. Different sectors, different roles, different contexts. But the weight we were carrying? Almost identical. Significant responsibility, limited resources, complex stakeholders, and people looking to us for steadiness in the middle of uncertainty. And...
4 months ago • 4 min read
By Jo Glover The Meeting Overload Problem Look at most health operations leaders’ calendars right now and you will see back-to-back meetings from early morning until late afternoon. And yet decisions are still slow. Actions are rolling over. Staff are exhausted. And the real work — the thinking, the planning, the follow-up, the team support — keeps getting pushed to the edges of the day. We are busy. We are connected. We are coordinated. But we are not necessarily moving. That is the meeting...
5 months ago • 3 min read
By Jo Glover The 4 Cs of brave leadership There is a myth in leadership that holds many good people back. It is the idea that confidence comes first. That before we apply for the role, have the difficult conversation, lead the change, or step into something bigger, we should feel fully ready. But that is rarely how growth works. Most of us do not start with confidence. We start with uncertainty. We start with doubt. We start with that uncomfortable feeling of not quite knowing whether we can...
5 months ago • 3 min read